On Saturday, PA GOP Senatorial candidate Everett Stern held a press conference at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia to lay down some pretty serious accusations: That he’d been approached earlier this year by disgraced former US Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn’s “Patriot Caucus” to gather intelligence — opposition research, really — on two sitting major Republican elected officials from PA: Senator Pat Toomey and Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick.
Specifically, the Caucus was looking for info they could use to strongarm Toomey and Fitzpatrick alike to support further audits of the 2020 presidential election, Stern claimed. And while it may not have been out of line for anyone to request his services — Stern runs the private intelligence agency Tactical Rabbit, and was a major whistleblower in the HSBC Bank scandal some years ago — it was the requests themselves that struck Stern as deeply concerning.
He says he was told to gather as much “dirt” on them as he could and that the group was not above “using domestic terrorism” to further their cause — namely, the overturn of the 2020 presidential election. He then said that he’d alerted federal authorities of the matter.
As the Washington Post releases a trove of evidence on the Jan. 6 insurrection and the organizing bodies around it, Stern’s claims would seem to both back up what we’re learning about the movement while also coming at a time of major politicking around it, both for and against.
“I’m here today not as a candidate running for U.S. Senate, I’m here as a citizen who is genuinely concerned about our country,” said Stern, on the Saturday before Election Day across the U.S., one year before he’s on the ballot hoping to replace Toomey.
And the mix becomes even stranger when you consider the strange place Bucks-based Representative Brian Fitzpatrick occupies around all of this. To put it succinctly, Fitzpatrick has been seen to denounce the insurrection at the same time as he’s been cozying up to some of Bucks’ leading insurrectionist faces. He’s effectively both compromised to his party’base whilst having been seldom attractive over the last two years to anyone of any other political persuasion, either.
These revelations, if true, only seem to drive that idea home even more: Fitzpatrick looks like a man without a country right now. Literally.
As has been his mode as insurrection-adjacent stories concerning Fitzpatrick now seem to be a regular occurrence, the U.S. Representative has not yet commented on the matter. Since the press conference, Stern has taken to Twitter to further his claims, even providing images of the crew that approached him.
Watch Stern’s remarks in full here:
